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Wednesday, September 26, 2012

The Community Kitchen is CERES newest enterprise project, it's been open for not quite six months - so we're still testing the water a little; seeing what works, what people want to use it for and how we can best accommodate that.

But you know what, for the first few months its been pretty quiet, not dead quiet, but quiet enough for us to hear the reverberation of our voices in there at times and get a little nervous about it.

But I have good news - the Kitchen has been a hive of activity for the last week.

I'm so excited about it I'm going to give you a rundown.

On Friday the fashionable and lovely girls and guys from Peppermint cooked a Mexican feast with Alice from season four of MasterChef. There's a blog post coming soon on Peppermint, but if you can't wait to see what happened you can check out Leeyong Soo's blog post about it here.

On Saturday we hosted a ladies day - 21 well dressed ladies descended on the kitchen. I'm not sure that the kitchen will ever see so many pairs of heels again. These ladies made cakes, salads, home made pasta and sauces, drank some champagne and left again. It was a whirlwind and I went home for a little nap afterwards.

On Sunday the good people from Worldwide Event to End Animal Cruelty hired the Community Kitchen as part of their festival - the kitchen saw a day of vegan food demonstrations from local cooks and chefs.

On Monday evening, the Community Kitchen was the site of Brunswick's first Mixed Dozen dinner. This is mysterious, and we better not say too much more about it. They definately had dessert.

On Tuesday the kitchen had a break. RMIT work education students usually use the kitchen for hospitality training on a Tuesday, but while they're on holidays I used the opportunity to install shiny new shelving and give the kitchen a good solid clean.

On Wednesday some corporate folks from the big city ventured out to Brunswick to have a cook-off. They're getting ready to compete with other branches of their offices from all over Australia. Our resident food blogger Sophie from CERES Global was the discerning judge. (Check out her blog here)

Tonight myself and other CERES staff are having what we're calling StaffBake - we've taken the idea of MamaBake and we're running with it - doing some big batch cooking. This is our first Staff Bake so we dont quite know what to expect, but I'm guessing there'll be some good food, some new recipes, some joy, some wine and some of Noel's famous dahl. I'll do my best to post some pictures soon.

Next week will be a little quieter, but we'll rest easy knowing that the demand is there for our kitchen, and that the word of mouth network is spreading the story of our kitchen and its many uses ever wider.